That, of course, is the lesson of the Christmas story. My wife and I visited Bethlehem in January, and visited the birthplace of Jesus, or what is traditionally thought to be so. A small cave under the main altar. A star marks the birth place, which is a niche is the wall. It occured to me that Mary, like the people of her time, was a very small person. Not like the beefy, well-fed people such as those of us who crowded into that small area. If that is the place, as Helena decided it was, then it was a place where a family lived. Roughly the size of the houses of most of the people of the world even today. We live better than the nobles of old, but like them so often indifferent to the plight of “lesser folk.”When I got back to the hotel, I thought to myself, how like a palace it was. How distant from him, in many ways.
Another take on this whole story — a level deeper — is do we make room for Mary and Joseph and Jesus in our own inn — our heart?